MIH (Media Independent Handover) for green wireless communications

International audience; In this paper, we address the problem of energy saving in communication networks; we give more interest to heterogenous networks seeing their major role in the future wireless communication, namely, the future cellular networks (5G) [1]. The specificity of heterogenous networks, is the way that MNs (mobile nodes) switch between different communication technologies, this is known by vertical handovers. The aim of this work is to make the used protocols for vertical handover collaborative, to reach more energy efficiency for the entire network. We based our study on MIH (Media Independent Handover) protocol [2], some modifications are made into this later, in order to create a green collaborative MIH protocol. The proposed enhancements on MIH allow us to get more information about network state; these information are used as statistics to adapt network density according to traffic load. This is achieved by switching off the less efficient PoAs (Points of Attachement) within the network. Our experimentations are performed using NS2.29 [3] with Nist (National Institute of Standards and Technology) add-on which implement MIH process (802.21). The results of the proposed contribution are compared to the conventional MIH protocol and showed a significant improvement in terms of energy saving while maintaining reliability.